Quote collection
679 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example."
"Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain."
"For what we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera."
"A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face."
"Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east."
"Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations."
"Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe."
"A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism."
"They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now" "But God doesn't change" "Men do though"
"The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth."
"It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged."
"Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment"
"The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing."
"Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves."
"Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species."
"If only people would realize that moral principles are like measles.... They have to be caught. And only the people who've got them can pass on the contagion."
"I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world."
"What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash."
"In real life there is no such person as the average man."
"The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals."